Tom Chivers reviews the first series box-set of Game of Thrones, the
fantasy drama based on the epic novels by American author George RR Martin.

It almost doesn't need reviewing: the Game of Thrones box set release was a fairly nailed-on winner for "biggest DVD event of 2012" even before the series finished screening on telly last summer. This fantastically intricate, beautifully filmed, impressively grown-up piece of television brought fantasy out of its slightly nerdy, Warhammer-gaming boy-genre niche and sent it thundering into the mainstream.

Based on the dark, bloody and sex-filled novels by George RR Martin - so far there are five, averaging around a thousand pages each, released over a 16-year period with two more to come - the programme is suitably dark, bloody and sex-filled, with rarely an episode in which someone is not beheaded, tortured, or seen engaging in graphic incest in a crumbling castle while trying to murder a child. But while it is undoubtedly not for the young or easily disgusted, it's rarely gratuitous.

Set in a fictional world called Westeros, where a king on the Iron Throne rules over an uneasy conglomerate of lands called the Seven Kingdoms, it follows the lives (and frequent, sudden, brutal deaths) of several powerful families. The Starks - headed by Ned Stark, played by Sean Bean - rule Winterfell in the wintry north, where an ancient, enormous wall of ice defends the Kingdoms from some semi-mythical evil beyond. Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), the corpulent libertine king, and his conniving wife Cersei (Lena Headey) of the Lannister family, rule in the south. Across the sea, the offspring of the deposed former king form an alliance with the Dothraki, a semi-wild tribe of nomadic horsemen, and plot a return to what is rightfully theirs.

If all that sounds like the sort of sub-Lord of the Rings thing that would immediately turn you off, it shouldn't. Unlike most of the dull, adolescent fantasy that reaches bookshelves and cinema screens, GOT is peopled with actual characters, and focuses far more on the human interaction and political intrigue than the magic-and-monsters side of things. Indeed in the whole of this first series, only twice does anything clearly supernatural happen - one right at the beginning, featuring undead children walking in a frozen forest, which is one of the most unnerving things on television in years. The obvious comparisons are The Sopranos or The West Wing, not Dungeons & Dragons.

The DVD comes with a few fun extras, including a look at the "artificial language" of Dothraki - which contains more than 3,000 words, apparently - and the usual interviews and commentaries. Peter Dinklage, who plays the sly and witty dwarf Tyrion Lannister, is particularly worth listening to.